by Paul Magrs
‘Come on,’ I told Effie. ‘We’re going out tonight. Let’s get our gladrags on.’
Even though I suggested the pie-and-peas night at the Christmas Hotel, Effie agreed. She hadn’t thought much of it last time, but I could see that she, too, wanted to be among noise and laughter. And those pensioners’ nights were the rowdiest to be had round here.
Robert was waiting by his tureen of mulled wine, dressed as an elf as per usual. Effie and I let him take our outdoor things and I asked after his aunt.
‘She’s better than she was,’ he admitted. ‘More human, at least.’
Effie tutted quietly, as if Robert had said something awful.
‘But there’s something else, isn’t there?’ I asked. I could tell by the look on his face.
‘It’s this place,’ he said. ‘There’s something going on here. Bad stuff. Jessie won’t stop talking about it—’
‘Ladies!’ We were interrupted by the proprietress bursting through the doors into the foyer. Resplendent in her wheelchair, she seemed more triumphantly festive than ever. The elves who pushed her looked even more slavish and ground down. ‘I knew we’d soon have you as regulars.’ Mrs Claus cackled. ‘People get addicted, don’t they? They can’t resist the good cheer and excellent fayre we offer. Welcome! Welcome!’
She was wheeled through the swing doors into the main dining hall, where carols were ringing out and the excited hubbub of a hundred or so pensioners greeted her.
‘Try as I might, I just can’t stick that woman.’ Effie sighed. She glared at Robert. ‘How do you elves put up with her?’
‘There isn’t much choice, really. Who else would employ us?’
He came with us into the dining hall to show us to a table. It was only then that I realised the felt holly leaves and berries on his tight-fitting green pants were meant as a Christmassy fig leaf.
All around us, at the other tables, pensioners were munching heartily, gravy dribbling down their chins. Effie was disgusted. ‘Have they lost their manners? Have they gone feral?’ As they ate, some were mumbling along with a sickly version of ‘Winter Wonderland’ playing over the speakers.
Once we were settled on our usual table and glancing through the menu, which offered little more than pie-and-peas, Robert bent close to my ear and whispered, ‘Can I meet you for a quick word later on?’
I saw Effie’s ears prick up. ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Is it about your aunt?’
‘Something else,’ he said. ‘About this place.’ He looked very shifty now. ‘Elves are disappearing.’
The pies were even more delicious than they had been last time. The hotel must have changed its supplier. They were thick and golden-crusted, suety and hot, devoid of the annoyingly cavernous pockets of air that ruin most modern pies. Even Effie was uncomplaining about the food that evening.
As ever, there was widespread geriatric jollity at the Christmas Hotel - the popping of crackers and rustling of party hats, the wheezing cackles and the tinkle of fork tines against false teeth. Holding court over all, Mrs Claus sat at High Table, tucking into what appeared to be four of her pies and a mound of mushy peas. The woman was gargantuan. Her eyes gleamed with delight at all she surveyed.
‘Gloop.’ Jessie was at our side, bringing dessert wines and menus. She was standing a little straighter and had shaved. Her ‘gloop’ - right in my ear - was one of the most melancholy sounds I have ever heard.
‘Did you? Did you eat? Did you eat everything?’ she asked. I was pleased that she was getting the hang of human language again. Effie looked miffed that she was thrusting her face at us and asking questions, but she had never been fond of Jessie.
‘We had the lovely pies,’ I said.
‘Oh. Oh dear. Oh dear me.’ Jessie took our plates and loped off.
We watched her go. ‘Maybe there’s a spell in one of those old books of magic in your house,’ I said thoughtfully, ‘and you could turn her back to normal.’
Effie tutted. ‘I very much doubt it.’ She can look proper toffee-nosed when she wants to. ‘Anyway, she’s better like that. She could be very boastful before, when she was glamorous.’
‘I think I’ll pop out before the bingo begins,’ I said, struggling up, ‘and powder myself.’
‘Your nose, Brenda,’ sighed Effie. ‘And hurry back. If they start without you I won’t do your books. I can’t keep up with them all. They call the numbers too fast.’
I ambled and shimmied my way back to the main entrance. Now I was being furtive and spylike in my new print frock. I’d put it on especially for my night out and I was afraid it made me look frumpy, matronly. But I had to meet an elf on secret business.
Robert waved me into the coffee lounge. It was gloomy and neglected, compared with all the noise and life elsewhere. The room was filled mostly with chairs arranged in a circle round a tall fireplace. A hefty china pig sat on the mantelpiece with a curious expression. I had the oddest feeling it was listening in on us.
‘She’s giving us something to control us. Haven’t you noticed how docile the elves are? We’re like her slaves.’ The words came bursting out of him. Evidently he had been bottling them up for days.
‘What?’ I gasped. ‘Who? What’s she giving you?’
He paced around on the threadbare monogrammed carpet, running a hand through his cropped hair. ‘I don’t know what it is. Some awful drug to make us submissive and biddable. She’s slipping it into our cocoa or our booze. I don’t know. No, it’s the cocoa. Definitely.’
‘Mrs Claus?’ I said. I shivered. I wouldn’t have put it past her. I thought of the elves who pushed her about in her wheelchair and attended to her every need. They were strapping lads, every one of them, but their expressions were placid and unnaturally cheerful.
‘I’ve only just become aware of this in the past few days,’ Robert said. ‘Until then I was as drugged as the rest of them. I just couldn’t see what she was up to.’
‘How did you work it out?’ I glanced at the pot pig on the mantelpiece, its face screwed up in concentration. Could it be bugged?
‘I’d missed a few nights in a row,’ he said. ‘We’re given our night-time cocoa in the kitchens - it’s a ritual. Everyone has to have cocoa at eleven, even those of us who can’t bear it.’
‘I see,’ I said. ‘I suppose it helps you sleep.’ I imagined Mrs Claus pouring it into mugs held by a line of tired Christmas elves. ‘I wonder what she puts in it.’
‘Something to pacify us,’ he said. ‘Something to dull us to the rigours of being continuously filled with Christmas cheer.’ He shuddered. ‘Because I’ve managed to duck out of the cocoa ritual, I’ve become aware of what everyone’s like. It’s a nightmare here. It’s like being mad. I’ve had this slowly dawning realisation that, among all the tinsel and streamers, everyone, but everyone, is completely bonkers . . .’
I put on my best figuring-it-all-out face. I was so pleased that Robert had thought to bring his problems to me. I was determined to do my best for him. ‘So why did you miss out on the drugged cocoa, these past few nights?’
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘I’ve been slipping out into the town in the hour before midnight.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Is that not allowed?’
He looked scandalised. ‘There’s a curfew on all of us at the hotel. We have to be in for the night, every night. No one out after eleven, by order of Mrs Claus. She tells us that Whitby is a weird town, teeming with demons, and that we wouldn’t be safe out there. And we believe her! She drugs us and we believe every word she says!’
‘But it’s nonsense,’ I said. ‘True, there are some strange goings-on, especially recently, but it’s nothing like she says. Why, me and Effie have been out late quite a lot - whenever we fancy it. Just the other night we were making a TV programme all the way through the night until dawn!’ I was showing off for this bright young boy, and I knew it.
‘I always thought she was lying,’ he said. ‘This curfew is just an extension of her determination to control e
veryone. Mrs Claus wants to be in command of everything her staff get up to. She was furious when Auntie Jessie rejuvenated herself without permission. So, anyway, I started sneaking out in the night, and hoped that my absence in the cocoa line wouldn’t be noticed.’
‘Good for you,’ I said. ‘Sneaking out to do what?’
‘Oh . . .’ he said. ‘Just running about the town, mostly.’
I chuckled. ‘Do you mean running after fellas?’
Robert coloured. ‘Okay. I do. I was getting up to naughty stuff. And it felt gloriously rebellious and liberating. Especially when I thought of all the other elves, tucked up in their beds before midnight. Sleeping deeply, ready to wake at dawn for yet another Christmas Eve, starting all over again . . . And, meanwhile, there was I, out on the sands where the sea had been, being rude in the dunes with complete strangers.’ He looked like he expected me to be shocked.
‘It sounds thrilling,’ I said. ‘Rude in the dunes, indeed.’ I think he’d imagined me to be a good deal more prim, like the elderly B-and-B lady I apparently am. But I’ve seen far too much of life to be shocked by anything, let alone the various rudenesses of men.
Robert laughed at himself. ‘Anyway. Maybe it was the stiff, salty air, the sleeplessness or just the shock of good sex, I didn’t know at first . . . but I returned to the hotel refreshed and with all my senses sharpened. And I didn’t like what I saw. The whole place is rotten and dirty, Brenda. The decorations have been up for years. Everything is fly-blown and mothbally. There’s an air of corruption about the place . . .’
‘What do you want me to do?’ I asked.
Even through the walls we could hear the boom and crackle of the microphone. It was bingo time in the dining hall. Effie would be cursing me, spending so long powdering my nose, leaving her to check all the books.
Robert smiled, pleased that I wanted to help. ‘You see, these suspicions and half-formed thoughts had been swirling about in my head for a number of days. I didn’t know if I was imagining things or not. And I felt weird, too, with sleeping so little and having to work so hard for the pittance she pays us . . . But then one night, at the end of last week, I bumped into Martin in the dunes.’
‘Martin?’
‘Another elf. He’d sneaked out too. He wasn’t surprised to see me there, among the scrubby grass. It’s where all the fellas from town go lurking and cruising, looking for a bit of action.’
Action! Robert’s story was certainly an eye-opener. Wait till Effie heard all this!
‘It was odd, bumping into a fellow elf, in that night-time place of freedom, badness and revelry. I knew it was him straight away. And he said exactly what I’ve been telling you. About the cocoa and the drugs. And the way we’re made to feel continuously cheery and Christmassy against our will. He’d formed the same suspicions as I had.’
I imagined them confessing their outlandish ideas to each other, under the moonlight, on the dunes, like creatures out of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, frolicking about, limbs entangled, as they whispered their paranoid thoughts.
‘The thing is,’ he said, ‘Martin’s gone. He vanished at the weekend. At first he wasn’t there at breakfast on Sunday morning. I went to check his dorm, up in the attic. None of his pals had seen him since the previous day. And he isn’t the first elf to go missing in recent weeks. It’s five altogether.’
‘Five!’
‘Mrs Claus won’t call in the police. They haven’t disappeared, she says. She shrugs those monstrous shoulders and grins. What can she do? Her elf workers are so flighty. They come and they go. Will-o’-the-wisps. She’s been let down before by them. This is how it goes.’ Robert was growing agitated. ‘The truth is, she’s got runaways here. Illegal immigrants. Kids who’ve left home and not told anyone where they are. Anything could happen to them. Anything, Brenda!’
I nodded resolutely. ‘We’ll help, Effie and I.’
‘Good,’ he said. ‘I knew you would. You’re just the person we need. Someone who can deal with this . . . strange kind of stuff.’
‘Honestly, Brenda! And you actually sat there and listened to all of his nonsense? But I shouldn’t be surprised. You’re always being taken in by people. You’re too soft, you are.’
Effie was just vexed because she’d come close to winning the big prize. Just one number left. Pipped at the post by someone called Big Sue, who was wearing a woollen hat indoors and whooped like crazy when her number came up. Effie had pursed her lips and slowly, calmly, ripped her bingo books into the tiniest pieces. Confetti all over our table. ‘I never win anything,’ she moaned. ‘Even when I thought I was having a TV show made about me it had to go to the bad, didn’t it?’ She looked at me as if that had been my fault.
As we walked home along the dusky, windswept prom, I was in no mood for one of her nasty tempers. She’d be sniping all night if I didn’t pull her out of it. ‘Well, I believe him. Robert’s a sincere young man.’
‘Brenda, dear!’ Effie crowed. ‘Listen to what he was telling you. He was saying all kinds of unrepeatably disgusting things that you, nevertheless, saw fit to repeat to me. He was telling you that he habitually runs about the sand dunes in the evenings, looking for like-minded men to - to do terrible things with.’
I had to laugh at that. ‘Terrible things? Really, Effie! You’re so prim sometimes. He’s young. Let him have his fun. He’s only talking about sex—’
‘Ssssh!’ hissed Effie, though there was no one to hear us. ‘I’ve never heard anything so disgusting. This is a family tourist destination, Brenda.’ She clutched her handbag tighter under her bosom, as if even the mention of such things might summon up hordes of lawless, lascivious men, clambering up the cliff face and on to the prom. ‘Anyway,’ she went on, ‘drugs, indeed! Yes, I imagine that drug-taking does go on among the younger staff members at the Christmas Hotel. But I don’t for one moment imagine that narcotics are administered with their nightly cocoa. I’ve never heard the like.’
I sighed. ‘You must admit, Effie, that Mrs Claus, as she calls herself, can’t be quite right in the head.’
‘Who am I to say? She’s certainly eccentric. As I say, I personally can’t stick her. But I’m sure she’d never harm anyone.’
But there was something in that woman’s huge, jolly, red-veined face that unnerved me. She was like a ripe Christmas apple past its best: shiny on the outside, but all wormy and cankered within. I didn’t share that thought with Effie.
We bade each other good night outside Effie’s shop. I watched her lock herself indoors, imagining her shut up in there for the night with all her ancient junk and her arcane books. I wondered vaguely if, since the TV crew’s visit, she had attempted to penetrate the mysterious texts left to her by her female forebears. I assumed that was precisely what she was doing. I pictured her sitting up each night by candlelight, devouring Wiccan lore, dabbling with forces best left alone. Well, good luck to her. From the sound of it, we could do with some extra powers at our disposal.
I hauled myself wearily up the stairs to my luxurious attic. No guests this week. I could languish, spread out and ponder recent events.
In a way, Effie was right to resist being drawn into Robert the elf’s concerns. It was too soon for us to plunge into another mystery. I was still dealing with the shock and repercussions of our last bizarre affair. I could still hear that voice booming out of Brian, the psychic Geordie. Talking about our destiny. Our duty. About hell bursting open and filling our town with . . . what? The damned? Demons we would have to deal with?
What fitted Effie and me for such a task?
But then I had the answer. Effie had magic and good sense at her fingertips. And I was unnatural. Soulless. Strong and good-hearted - I am good-hearted, even though I was made a monster. I wish the best for those I meet in this world.
Is that enough for dealing with the damned?
Before going to bed I had some hot milk and flipped through the lunchtime post, which I hadn’t yet had a chance to examine. Among the j
unky flotsam there was a letter in a Jiffy-bag from Lisa Turmoil. It was chatty and sweet. She hoped to return to my B-and-B some time with her fiancé for a weekend break, rather than on business. The crew of Manifest Yourself ! were back at work, keeping awake at night and scrutinising the swarming darkness in chilly castles and old pubs, with small, unspectacular results. There had been nothing like what had made itself apparent in Effie’s house. They couldn’t hope for that kind of success again.
As all their recordings had been ruined, there wouldn’t be a show about Effie’s house. I would never be seen on TV, shouting like a madwoman. Except . . . one recording did exist. Lisa, she explained, in her tiny, neat writing, had recorded the weird encounter at the climax of that night on her mobile phone. For some reason it had survived.
She had sent it to me on the enclosed disk, which I fished out and took to my kitchen stereo. Bless Lisa. She could have gone straight to Eunice and the film crew with it. She could have exploited it. But she wanted me to have it. She wrote that she thought I needed to hear it. I should listen very carefully to what had been said, in the heat of the moment, during the still watches of that night last week.
I played the disk with the sound turned up. Those voices rang out. Mine, all crazy and distraught. And Father’s. Welling up out of the distant past. Reverberating from the broad chest of Brian the psychic, filling his mind, blocking out all rational thought. Here came that voice again, coaxing me, cajoling me, telling me what was to come.
I listened to it several times.
Then I dashed to the sink. I was heaving and retching, and before I knew it I had thrown up everything I’d eaten that night. Pie, peas, the lot.
Strange thing was, Effie told me the next morning that she had done almost exactly the same. She put it more delicately than I did, of course, but she intimated to me, as we walked across town for morning coffee, that her stomach had given her gyp in the night. Like me, she had been hunched over the sink and the toilet. She had thrown up until nothing was left inside her, then lay about moaning, feeling wrung out and anguished, just as I had.